What Happened to Blade II: The Darker, Weirder Sequel That Worked
What do you do when you’ve had huge success with a movie about a Marvel Comics vampire hunter? For the makers of Blade, the answer was obvious: get Guillermo del Toro to direct a sequel that’s darker, weirder, and maybe somewhat cooler, even though Morbius had to be written out. The film goes deeper into horror territory while introducing a disturbing and disgusting new breed of vampire. Enemies have to team up. Familiar faces return, but can they be trusted? And will Blade ever get laid? Let’s cut this sucker open and find out what happened to Blade II.
Development
Screenwriter David S. Goyer teamed up with star Wesley Snipes, producer Peter Frankfurt, and director Stephen Norrington to bring the Marvel adaptation Blade to the screen. The story of a badass vampire hunter went over well with the audience and was a hit for distributor New Line Cinema. Made on a budget of forty-five million, the film earned over one hundred and thirty-one million at the box office.
Goyer had always envisioned a trilogy – and with box office like that, it was almost guaranteed that he would have the chance to make his trilogy. But that doesn’t mean Blade II would be the sequel he always had in mind.
Some of the ideas Goyer had involved time travel and a vampire apocalypse, along with the introduction of allies from the comics, like Hannibal King. But those early story ideas were scrapped, and Hannibal King got pushed into the third movie. Goyer’s back-up idea was to have Blade fight Morbius, a Marvel character who became a pseudo-vampire by conducting scientific experiments on himself. But Marvel wouldn’t let him use Morbius.
So he came up with a story that would involve a different sort of scientifically created vampire.
Story
Blade II tells us that, contrary to what the first movie led us to believe, Blade’s mentor Whistler is not dead. He turned into a vampire and has been held captive by bloodsuckers in Europe for the last year. After a long search, Blade catches up with Whistler in Prague, rescuing him and curing his vampirism.
Just as Whistler is settling in with Blade and his new sidekick Scud, another group of vampires shows up at their hideout… not to attack, but to ask for their help. They claim that the vampire virus has mutated, creating new creatures called Reapers, though we’ll later find out that the Reaper strain was created in a lab. These monsters can infect vampires and humans alike with their bites, and they’re led by Jared Nomak, who has a vendetta against regular bloodsuckers, especially the Nosferatu-like vampire overlord Eli Damaskinos.
An elite group of vampires called the Bloodpack has been assembled and trained to fight Blade… but now they need to team up with him to wipe out the Reapers before their infection spreads. So we have Blade working with vampires to fight even worse vampires. But all is not as it seems.
Finding a Director
The cool visual style Norrington brought to the first movie had been a key component in its success. But apparently, Norrington wasn’t interested in coming back for a sequel, which was fine with Goyer and Frankfurt because they had a different director in mind from the start. They wanted Blade II to have more of a horror edge, to be more suspenseful and scarier than its predecessor. And they thought the perfect director to bring the horror and scares would be Guillermo del Toro.
If you’ve ever wondered why nearly four years passed between the first two Blade movies, this was a big part of the delay: New Line Cinema was hesitant to sign off on the idea of del Toro directing Blade II. At the time, he was seen as an arthouse director. He had made the lower-budgeted genre movies Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone – and while he tried to work in the studio system with Mimic, it hadn’t been a good experience. None of his movies had been fast-paced or action-packed, so New Line saw no indication that he could be a good action director.
Del Toro was a fan of the first movie and even thought it was underrated, but it also took a while for him to agree to work on the sequel. He had never been interested in making a sequel to somebody else’s movie before. So when Goyer sent him the script, he just gave him some notes. Then Goyer integrated those notes and sent him the new draft. Del Toro gave him some more helpful suggestions. Goyer did more revisions – and the third time the script was sent to del Toro, he agreed to direct the film, if New Line would have him. It wasn’t until Wesley Snipes said he wanted del Toro to make the movie that New Line went along with the idea.
Del Toro’s Vision
Del Toro told Fangoria that he signed on for Blade II because he was “very curious about trying to do a new type of vampire that takes away the sympathetic, charming angle we’ve become so familiar with in the post-Anne Rice era. I wanted to do a completely unglamorous type of vampire, like a bottom feeder, and treat it almost like an animal.”
After making the deeply personal The Devil’s Backbone, he also wanted to work on “something light that would not demand enormous amounts of emotional investment, just like a joyride. I was completely drained and wanted to go into an amusement park, and that’s what this is.”
He was ready to prove that he was capable of directing action. And he wanted to challenge himself, because this was the first time he’d be directing a script he didn’t write: the challenge of executing someone else’s imagination. With his stories, he always relied on atmosphere, making things that were slow-moving and eerie. Goyer had written a fast-paced script, and del Toro would have to deliver a fast movie, one that would include edgy, nasty moments like the first one but wouldn’t go too far with the violence. As he put it, “We’re trying to make things fun. Whatever violence exists in the movie exists on a comic book or cartoon level.”
He wanted to bring a heightened, comic book style to every aspect of the film, from the violence to the visuals. His goal was for the imagery in Blade II to be one hundred percent comic book style – and to achieve that, he brought in comic book artists Mike Mignola, Tim Bradstreet, and Wayne Barlowe to draw designs. Barlowe was the one who came up with the look of the Reapers, which were then brought to life by legendary effects artist Steve Johnson. These things have chins that split open to reveal tentacle-suckers, they inject victims with a neurotoxin, and they’re more difficult to kill than the average vampire: their hearts are encased in bone, and they’re immune to silver and garlic.
Cast
Blade II was the first time Wesley Snipes came back to play one of his characters in a sequel. For this one, he was interested in playing a Blade that had become more comfortable with his half-vampire nature and had loosened up a bit. He even changed up the character’s fighting style, making him faster and less focused on traditional martial arts moves and poses, to reflect how comfortable he had become.
Asked why he enjoyed playing Blade so much, he explained, “He has all the freedoms of a bad guy without the restrains of a good guy, and that’s always fun to play. The opportunity to wear the costume and the outfits and be in a genre movie, at the same time doing martial arts – that’s very appealing to me. And that he is a kind of short-on-words, big-on-action type of guy is very appealing to me too. I’m much more verbose than he is, and more of a wuss.”
Snipes was also happy that the sequel would be an ensemble mission movie, with the set-up drawing comparisons to The Dirty Dozen or The Guns of Navarone, but with vampires. He felt it was a better approach to have Blade take on a number of different villains, rather than having just one villain try to live up to the first movie’s Deacon Frost.
A great cast was assembled around Snipes. Starting with Kris Kristofferson, who was surprised to have the chance to play Whistler again. He thought the guy was dead. Norman Reedus plays Scud, the young man who has been working with Blade in Whistler’s absence and is highly suspicious of Whistler when he returns.
The Bloodpack consists of Danny John-Jules as Asad; martial arts movie legend Donnie Yen – who was, unfortunately, given very little to do – as Snowman; Daz Crawford as a hammer-wielding vampire called Lighthammer; Marit Velle Kile as Lighthammer’s significant other Verlaine; Tony Curran as Priest, who doesn’t like any vampires that aren’t purebloods; del Toro regular Ron Perlman as Reinhardt, who gives Blade a hard time and gets an explosive device stuck on his head in response; Matt Schulze, who had a minor role as a different character in the first movie, as Chupa; and Leonor Varela as Nyssa, daughter of the ancient Eli Damaskinos, who’s played by Thomas Kretschmann.
Nyssa is the one Blade is really able to connect with – and their connection was even deeper in early drafts of the script. While Blade II was in pre-production, Goyer spoke with RevolutionSF and teased “Blade gets laid” in the sequel. Blade and Nyssa were supposed to be a romantic pairing, but that didn’t make it into the finished film.
Villain
Played by Luke Goss, Jared Nomak is the danger at the heart of the story. The Reaper infection can’t be allowed to spread… but Nomak isn’t the clear-cut “big bad,” either. As the story goes on, you find out how he became this monster and come to understand why he’s doing what he’s doing. It’s a Guillermo del Toro movie, so it’s no surprise to have a sympathetic monster somewhere in the mix.
Production
When a director doesn’t have action experience, they’ll often hand all of the action off to a second unit director. But del Toro won New Line over so much, they let him direct everything. From dialogue scenes to action sequences and even minor inserts, del Toro shot it all. And he proved that he was up for the challenge. He brought the darker, more suspenseful moments Goyer and Frankfurt hoped he would – and he also proved to be an awesome action director. There are impressive fight scenes throughout the movie, with Blade taking on a whole lot of vampires and Reapers. The scene where he battles Damaskinos goons after being reinvigorated in a blood bath is especially cool, along with, of course, the final fight between Blade and Nomak.
Release and Legacy
Blade II filmed in the Czech Republic from March 12th to July 2nd, 2001, aiming for release the following year. While the first movie came out at the end of summer in 1998, the sequel was scheduled to reach theatres on March 22, 2002. That would have been a negative sign for some. March was seen as something of a dumping ground for lesser movies around that time. But New Line Cinema had success releasing the franchise-starting horror movie Final Destination in March of 2000, so why not try putting a Blade movie out in that month?
It turned out to be a great decision.
Made on a budget of 54 million dollars, Blade II surpassed the first movie at the box office, pulling in a worldwide total of over 154 million. It was enough to get the third film in the trilogy on the fast track to production – and since that movie didn’t do as well when it was released in 2004, Blade II remains the highest-grossing film in the franchise.
Conclusion
Moviegoers wanted to see more of Blade, and del Toro gave them more in one of the best sequels fans could have possibly hoped for. Goyer and Norrington made this look easy with the ‘98 film, and del Toro did the same with the sequel… but when you see how Goyer himself fumbled the trilogy capper Blade: Trinity, it becomes clear: this Blade business wasn’t as simple as it seemed.
Guillermo del Toro wasn’t the obvious choice to direct the Blade sequel, but he turned out to be the perfect choice.
The post What Happened to Blade II: The Darker, Weirder Sequel That Worked appeared first on JoBlo.